The Moderation and Administration team has long been discussing the assembly of an all-purpose rules of debate/discussion guide, but have yet to write one that was easily intelligible (read that as: I wrote it, and it was characteristically and needlessly complex and technical, and no one else had the time to edit it).

Thankfully, while reading the moderate blog Balloon Juice, Tim F. wrote up an all purpose debate guide. The following is completely his work, and can be found right here.

Tim F wrote:The easiest way to lose a debate is to start throwing personal [stuff] at the other person. It’s bad form and sensible people generally take it as a sign that you don’t have anything worthwhile to say. On a practical level it embarrasses your allies and encourages your opponents.

Godwin’s Law, of course. In general I agree with the idea that you lose by comparing your opponent’s postition with the most ridiculously horrible thing that you can imagine, but there are limits. It’s not like the Nazis wiped their [butt] with Evil toilet paper and started their morning with Evil sausage links and a cup of Evil coffee. Wagner, and particularly his widow, were enthusiastic anti-semites. Does a music discussion end when you bring up Wagner? No, it doesn’t. Cry Godwin when somebody’s comparing you to a Nazi but be aware that German political history has useful lessons if we remove the medieval notion of Evil from every bratwurst and roll of toilet paper that passed through the country between 1938 and 1945.

By the same logic, “Leftism is bad because Pol Pot was leftist” qualifies as a Godwin violation while a specific comparison between factors that led to the rise of Pol Pot and similar factors in other countries does not.

Maybe the most useful point is to learn your logical fallacies. You don’t need to memorize the whole list, but the five or six most common will help you to figure out why you’re sure that somebody is wrong but you can’t quite put your finger on it. Humans have a certain innate logic that gets offended when it spots an obvious fallacy. Everbody knows ad hominem, which is kind of sad when we all violate it anyway. Somebody isn’t wrong because they’re a ‘moonbat’ or a ‘wingnut,’ even moonbats and wingnuts get things right sometimes. If you want to prove them wrong you have to try harder than that.

Reductio ad absurdum and slippery slope often go together; the first happens when you rephrase somebody’s argument in bad faith using the most extreme conceivable example and the second speaks for itself. Post hoc ergo propter hoc comes up when A happens followed by B and somebody inappropriately concludes that A causes B. There’s your illogic whenever you see somebody declare, “Democrats won’t start winning elections until they stop [X],” where [X] stands in for the writer’s pet peeve du jour.

I have a particular beef with the composition fallacy, which occurs whenever somebody picks the characteristics of an individual and transposes those characteristics onto the group to which they belong. You can safely identify composition whenever you see “The Left” or “The Right” in the vicinity of an adjective. On the downside, eliminating composition might leave the internet empty except for two people talking about Harry Potter.

Ad hominem is the best known of a large family of innapropriate-appeal fallacies. Anybody who assumes that something must be right because everyone says so is violating ad populum. Ad ignorantiam happens when you assume that something’s false because you don’t know it to be true. Inappropriate authority speaks for itself. Whenever the TV news has some airheaded pundit weigh in on a politically-important technical matter, there’s your fallacy. Appeal to unacceptable consequences comes up fairly often, for a classic illustration recall the argument that we can’t accept that Americans torture because if people accepted that we torture then it might encourage our enemies.

Another internet favorite, tu quoque, means ‘you too’ in Latin. I wouldn’t call this tactic useless to the same degree as ad hominem or ad populum, after all turnabout is fair play, but bear in mind that you aren’t touching the other person’s underlying logic by pointing out that he or she’s also a hypocrite/embezzler/necrophile.

This post has grown out of control and still that’s far from the whole list. For a comprehensive list and better explanations than I’ve given, check out Nizkor and the Fallacy Files.

It’s also bad form to assume bad faith on the other guy’s part. On a practical level Evil is a pretty rare commodity, and most people do what they do for decent intentions. Assume good faith until proven otherwise and you’ll be surprised how accomodating folks can be.

This is the best guide to being a better member of the internet community. This will also clear up a lot of the spam, trolling, passive flaming, and general bad netiquette that plagues most internet message boards (but, thankfully, not ours).

-neal

PS: lest anyone think I'm a lazy bum and just cut and pasted it, I had to enter all text formatting by hand. I slave for you.

cao cao#1 wrote:especially loved this part since I am half german people need to realise not all nazi's were personally killing jew babies they were drafted like everybody else .

Well they were an all volunteer army in the early days, but anyone who studies wars in any detail knows that to demonize every man on the wrong (or simply the losing) side in a professional army is just a fool.

I also would put forward this: It is very frustrating when you speak in earnest on one point only to have someone else jump in and fill out the rest of the thought in the way they assume 'someone like you' would. For instance, someone says something negative about Sun Jian (apolitical example), and then another guy jumps in and starts saying "Oh I suppose Liu Bei is a saint and an angel :rolleyes:"
That's a waste of time and a total derail. If you really want to express off point sarcasm just put a post it note up on your screen instead.